Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

2026 Election Reaction: The Democratic Tsunami

November 9, 2026 / / 0 Comments

As I sit down to write this post the day after the election – five days before I’ve scheduled the post to appear – a massive Democratic tsunami is forming. We haven’t determined the extent of it, but it’s big. Democrats have won just about every competitive race. They’ll win in the ballpark of 250-260 House seats and 54-56 Senate seats.

My predictions called for 235 and 52, respectively, which is still a large Democratic wave. The real wave, however, came in even larger.

Let’s dive into the details.

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Election Predictions: 2026 Edition

November 2, 2026 / / 0 Comments

The left didn’t have much skin in the game in 2024. Few of our candidates were on the ballot. And the Democrats chose to turn to the center-right for its votes. 2026 forms an interesting contrast.

DSA candidates, other leftists, and progressive Democrats dominated the headlines during the primaries. DSA bagged several key House primaries, and even a Senate primary. This means we’ll be paying close attention to how these candidates do, partly in order to gauge the success of DSA in its political goals.

DSA even provided us with a handy map of its endorsed candidates. I’ll be watching it on election night.

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This is an artistic drawing of a person in jail. The person's hands and the top of their head are visible, but in shadows. And there are bars across the front that are blacked out.

Why I’m Voting ‘No’ on the New Jail

October 26, 2026 / / 0 Comments

We’re a week away from the November election. In Johnson County, Iowa, our most important vote concerns the proposal for a bond to build a new jail. And it’s long past time for me to say a word about it.

I’m voting ‘no’ on the proposal, and I’ll say why. I’ll finish by critically analyzing the arguments from both the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns.

Neither side has argued well. Maybe that’s par for the course. But to me, it’s more evidence of the degeneration of our politics into subcultural signaling.

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An artistic depiction of a person dropping a ballot into a box with leftist sounding text and the label Voting is a Form of Harm Reduction.

‘Harm Reduction Voting’ is Just a Bad Analogy

October 19, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I’ve taken several cracks at common arguments progressives and leftists use to justify ‘voting blue no matter who.’ This includes, of course, the harm reduction argument. I even threw in an argument against a mutated form of the harm reduction argument, i.e., the odious ‘privilege argument.’

I’m satisfied with my previous work on the topic. The posts I linked above adequately address the intellectual basis for harm reduction voting arguments. But they dont quite hit what’s so irksome about these arguments. They don’t hit why ‘harm reduction voting’ so annoying to me and psychologically satisfying to many progressives.

So, that’s the topic I’ll hit today. I’ll cover what’s deeply out of order about the harm reduction argument for voting Democratic.

And it’s this: the argument is grounded in a fatally flawed analogy.

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